6. The word as the basic lexical unit.

Saussure, Humboldt,Vygotsky and Jean Aitcheson- the key role of a word in the structure and function of language.

George Miller (1991)... words- the fundamental units of language.

This, then, is a well-established tradition... and any approach aiming at a general theory of language must accord the word a central place. Few theories attribute to the word a truly central position in the language, and more than one approach either peripheralizes it or dispenses with it altogether as a linguistic entity.

Their role as the elements of discourse, the building blocks of meaning from which sentences are constructed.

L. Bloomfield viewed the word as a minimal free form. But it is not completely satisfying.

Allan Gartner: «The word is the unit of tongue.»

A word has its own make-up and somehow has an existence prior to, and even independent of that of any particular sentence.

Constituents of the word must be examined. The fact that a word can express different senses raises a serious problem. No generally acceptable principle of the word unity has been formed.

Smirnitsky has unity of all its forms and meanings.

It is words in general, not scientific words, that are scientifically important (Miller, 1991)

Guillaume: « A word consists of meaning and its physical sign.»

It is primarily a meaning construction and its inherent unity that lie in the mental component (of go-went as 1 word)

The human principle underlying language is that expression is possible only if smth has first been represented. The necessity of representing smth before expressing it is universal in space and time. It is this that makes the word a necessity in every act of language.

Definitions of a word are plentiful. Method as a major tool of scientific analysis borderlines criteria of a word:

phonological

morphological

semantic

syntactic

Thus, the boundaries of the lexicon also vary depending each time on the way we delimit words.

7. Typologies of meaning. Lexical and grammatical meaning.

Word-meaning is not homogeneous but is made up of various components that combination and interrelation of which determine the inner facet of the word. The 2 main types of meaning-the grammatical and lexical meanings in words and word-forms.

Grammatical meaning.Word-forms, such as girls, winters, joys, tables, etc. though denoting widely different objects of reality have something in common. This common element is the grammatical meaning of plurality which can be found in all of them.

Thus grammatical meaning may be defined ,as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, as, e.g., the tense meaning in the word-forms of verbs (asked, thought, walked, etc.) or the case meaning in the word-forms of various nouns (girl’s, boy’s, night’s, etc.).

In a broad sense it may be argued that linguists who make a distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning are, in fact, making a distinction between the functional (linguistic) meaning which operates at various levels as the interrelation of various linguistic units and referential (conceptual) meaning as the interrelation of linguistic units and referents (or concepts).

In modern linguistic science it is commonly held that some elements of grammatical meaning can be identified by the position of the linguistic unit in relation to other linguistic units, i.e. by its distribution. Word-forms speaks, reads, writes have one and the same grammatical meaning as they can all be found in identical distribution, e.g. only after the pronouns he, she, it and before adverbs like well, badly, to-day, etc.

Certain component of the meaning of a word is de-scribed when you identify it as a part of speech, since different parts of speech are distributionally different (cf. my work and I work).

Lexical Meaning. Comparing word-forms of one and the same word-observe that besides grammatical meaning, there is another component of meaning in them. This component is identical in all the forms of the word. E.g. the word-forms go, goes, went, going, gone possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on, but in each of these forms we find one and the same semantic component denoting the process of movement. This is the lexical meaning of the word which may be described as the component of meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all the forms of this word.

The difference between the lexical and the grammatical components of meaning is not to be sought in the difference of the concepts underlying the two types of meaning, but rather in the way they are conveyed. The concept of plurality, e.g., may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the world plurality; it may also be expressed in the forms of various words irrespective of their lexical meaning, e.g. boys, girls, joys, etc. The concept of relation may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the word relation and also by any of the prepositions, e.g. in, on, behind, etc. (cf. the book is in/on, behind the table). “

By lexical meaning we designate the meaning proper to the given linguistic unit in all its forms and distributions, while by grammatical meaning we designate the meaning proper to sets of word-forms common to all words of a certain class. Both the lexical and the grammatical meaning make up the word-meaning as neither can exist without the other. That can be observed in the semantic analysis of correlated words in different languages. E.g. сведения is not semantically identical with information because unlike сведения English word does not possess the grammatical meaning of plurality which is part of the semantic structure of Russian word.